January 1st, 2010

Welcome to the new year, new decade. Today is the day to start doing something great. Even if you don’t buy into the 1st of the year and resolutions, it is the first day of the new fiscal year and time for us to kick off our 2010 agenda.

Our resolution is that 2010 is the year of our partners: We have never been more involved in the building of our partners businesses and the way our marketing and support teams will push our partners in 2010 will surprise you.

First things first, let’s find out where you are at this moment: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTZF3BT

The survey above will give us an idea of how/if you work with us and what we can do to immediately improve in January. For us, 2009 was a year to retool, rebuild and revise all that we’ve build through the years. Our core products have been immensely popular through the years and we experienced some growing pains – but now we’re ready, with bandwidth and experience to take you to the next level.

Start by filling out the survey, whether you work with us or not: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTZF3BT

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. Remember, in 2010 I am here for you. You can reach me directly on my cell (407) 536-VLAD

Thank You, we’re OK

I would like to personally thank many of you that were concerned about me and my staff in beautiful Downtown Orlando. We are OK, thank you for the emails, texts and calls.

There was an office shooting a few blocks from our office in Downtown Orlando, apparent disgruntaled worker seriously harmed at least 7 people and is still at large with Orlando Police & SWAT looking for him. All banks and buildings are now closed.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured and their families. Please assist the authorities with any information you may have.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Support SLA Interruption

On Monday, October 12th, 2009, we will be suspending our normal and lower SLA response times.

While we do not expect to have any interruptions in the support availability, during certain times staff will only be tasked with responding to high and urgent priority requests during business hours in the EST time zone. We are using a quiet holiday on Monday to roll out our new SLA framework, new call handling and handoff procedures and completely test the systems.

We expect to announce the changes to our support systems later this week and thank you for your patience during this launch. We will certainly do all we can to help during this time, we just wanted to apologize for any inconveniences that may be caused ahead of time.

Tough Times

The downturn in the economy has affected many of our partners, between downturn in business, longer collection periods, tighter credit market and more have made the reoccuring billing business a lot more difficult.

As the CEO of Own Web Now, I am here to tell you that we stand by our partners and we are willing to work with anyone that may be going through a tough time collecting money from clients. We’re in on this together.

However, in the interest of fairness, if we cannot contact you we cannot assume the collections expense that goes with avoiding calls and emails – we are simply not in that business. With the launch of new ExchangeDefender, new Shockey Monkey, new systems for our entire hosting platform we simply must turn our focus to the software and professional services our partners demand.

Today, we have had to say goodbye to a number of our partners that have had a poor payment track record (6+ months declines/delinquencies of 10+ days or more). In plain terms that means that we’ve had partners who have missed a payment every other month and that raises the fees for everyone which is simply not fair. Our partners and clients expect us to spend every dollar on R&D and enhancements, not collections.

I wanted to offer you our billing collections process so that you’re aware of our attempts:

1st of the month: If the transaction has been declined, retry transaction and document.

2nd of the month: Open support request in our portal (https://support.ownwebnow.com) about the past due invoice, retry transaction.

5th of the month: Retry transaction. If it still fails a phone call is made to the billing contact on record, if they were not contacted directly (secretary, voicemail) support request is updated.

8th of the month: Retry transaction. If it still fails a phone call is made with the 2nd notice, support request is updated.

10th of the month: Final retry and suspension notice is given in the portal. Partner is given 24 hours to provide valid billing information.

11th of the month: If the new billing information is not provided, all services are suspended.

We are not heartless, we are more than willing to work with companies that are affected by the economic downturn. Unfortunately, if we cannot contact you on the phone, if the support portal is ignored and over a week passes with repeated notices, we have no choice but to move on.

Today we have permanently suspended companies that have abused our kindness and had a consistently poor payment track record. It is within our right to suspend services within 3 days, charge reconnection fees, etc: We usually do not. However, when our company is clearly abused we have no choice but to reconsider whether it’s fair to other partners to let a small group of companies abuse the billing concessions we have made.

So to recap: Collections are expensive and we’re a software company; that meant that we’ve had to remove a number of partners that abused our billing grace periods. We know it’s tough out there, reach out to us and we will bend backwards to help you.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek

CEO, Own Web Now Corp.

Autotask Integration Live!

After many months of development, feedback and suggestions we are happy to announce the Autotask integration with Own Web Now. We are the first vendor to offer full support request syncronization, allowing Own Web Now to handle full support of all it’s products through the Autotask API – free of charge! No more double ticket entry, no more searching two portals, no more running around – everything is in Autotask.

Additionally, we have eliminated one of the most consuming administrative tasks regarding ExchangeDefender: Mailbox counts. With Autotask, this process is automated. Own Web Now will submit mailbox counts to Autotask and keep them in sync so they can be billed automatically, making sure you are paid for all the services you are paying for – automatically!

Finally, while the integration whitepaper and process is free, many partners indicated that they would rather have us handle the integration and support for them. We are offering this service for $199 one-time fee during the launch to make sure you hit the ground running. In addition to saving you some time and making sure everything is perfect, this package also gives you actual support for the integration should things change or you ever experience any issues.

We are proud to also start a new training series featuring whitepapers, webcasts and podcasts covering the way some of the best in business use the Autotask integration with Own Web Now to be more efficient and profitable. This is included at no additional charge with the Support Package mentioned above.

To get started, check out http://www.ownwebnow.com/autotask

Have a great day!

Looking for integration demo partners

As many of you are aware, we have been working on some very advanced PSA integrations with Autotask and Shockey Monkey over the past quarter. We have integrated our baseline statistics into both products. We have also extended our support portal to both so that tickets opened in your portal can be quickly assigned to our teams for resolution. We even help with the agreements and user counts, synchronizing the mailbox counts, GB’s, etc to your own portal so you can keep all your business intelligence no matter which PSA you use. Limited subset of these features is also available with ConnectWise (will be expanded to the same full functionality set when their API matures/stabilizes).

Right now, we need some volunteers that are willing to discuss the business value and technical implementations of our integration efforts.

If you use Autotask and like both Autotask and Own Web Now, I would like to invite you to a quick podcast so we can discuss what the joint efforts are doing for your business and your PSA experience with Autotask. The advantage is that you’ll get the integration done first, it will be handled by one of our senior engineers and you’ll get all the benefits of our business training going forward.

Interested? Contact Travis Sheldon at travis@ownwebnow.com.

P.S. Documentation on the above is not available at this time, it will be available in August. Support for any of the above is not available from Own Web Now Corp, Autotask Corporation, ConnectWise or any other third party. Purpose of this blog post is to get individuals interested in promoting their business and technology implementation know-how and benefit both companies.

ExchangeDefender SMBUP Session

Greetings from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Thanks to all our partners for visiting our booth, we are officially out of really good swag!

Earlier today Travis and I held the first SMBUP session for ExchangeDefender. The acronym stands for Smack My B* Up, and gives our partners the ability to dish out all the angst, anger, frustration and impatience they have with our products and processes: both with us and with our other partners. For many years I have done my best to create systems and encourage partners to provide feedback so we can improve the most painful parts of doing business with us.

This may sound unconventional and definitely takes some thick skin, but we wanted to do something new. Traditionally, software is designed on the input of focus groups. Fixes are then applied throughout the production process and tweaked in functionality and features based on feedback.

This is different. I wanted to know what our partners really disliked about our business and our products so that new ones are built to avoid those problems.

Letting the partners vent directly at me and directly with each other could create a potential gang warfare mentality. However, we have worked on cultivating our partnerships long enough to know that our partners have our best interest in mind because we are doing this to take care of them and their clients.

What happened? My partners at WPC came with complaints that were not critical or combative – instead, we got the problem and the proposed solution pathway, mitigation and recommendations based on the other partners who have not (yet) experienced an issue.

Tune in over the next 60 days as we document, disect and provide a solution to the problems we were made aware of today.

In case you’ve ever wondered just what we mean by partnerships this is it. Technology companies  working towards pleasing the common client base.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Better Support Escalation

Have you ever asked a support question that you regretted a moment later? It happens to all of us, when complexity meets lack of time and a skipped lunch, we tend to ask some of the most obvious questions. Even more frustrating activity is trying to get basic answers that were probably covered somewhere in the wealth of documentation and knowledge base articles.

How about a frustrating system outage on your dedicated server that you needed addressed immediately but didn’t want to pay for escalated support? Even though we fulfill 99% of our support requests within the Urgent SLA window free of charge it still doesn’t seem friendly to get the nastygram about fees required for urgent support – especially when something out of your control is down.

Today, we fixed both of those problems with a small, even elegant, option that you may not even notice most of the time when opening a ticket. But trust me, you will like to know it’s there working for you. Take a look at the new “Service” dropdown option that is available when creating a new ticket:

This dropdown allows you to select the service that you are requesting support for. This helps us route the request to the most qualified individual on the support team that can address your request quickly.

Note that when you select an item you will be presented with a checkbox to tell us if this is a service outage. If the outage affects the entire organization, and you check this box, we will escalate the request for free and bump you to the front of the queue.

Please be mindful that we are monitoring for fraudulent use of this function. So in case your “system down” scenario consists of a single Exchange 2007 mailbox whose password expired, you might find this setting disappears if it is abused. Please be courteous to the other clients and use this feature when it’s absolutely needed, it’s here to save you money and I’m sure that in your time of need you wouldn’t want our support giving priority to something other than a true outage.

But wait, there’s more!

When you select the given category you will immediately be presented with the “Popular Answers” section right on the new support page. These articles are written by the staff that provides ongoing product support and contain a lot of information that you may want to look through and save time waiting for a response.

Hope you enjoy the ongoing improvements and keep on sending us your suggestions so we can serve you better.

This feature will be making an appearance in SM 3.0 for our MSP partners this May.

Come and see us at MSP University Bootcamp

We have the pleasure of sponsoring the MSP University Bootcamp this week and supporting our friends Erick and Garry who have given this event to attendees free of charge in this tough economy. Over 100, very professional looking folks, in attendance going through all aspects of developing and managing an MSP practice.

If you are out in the beautiful Orange County, stop by and say hi!  We have shirts, pens, iPods and all sorts of swag to get you through the weekend. We’re also here to make you money and get you a jumpstart on the hosting services that are selling like hotcakes 😉

Important: We’re doing the biggest event promotion we’ve ever done, considering the current economy, so make sure to stop by and talk to us about it as it expires this weekend.